I don't disagree we shouldn't be expanding power consumption unless we've moved the vast majority (>90%) of the load off fossil fuels, but this certainly didn't help anything.
Imagine I'm a factory building widgets. If I buy materials, my default assumption is that I get the materials I asked for. If 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, my vendor sends me junk that breaks my machines, now I have to introduce a step to verify that the vendor sent me the right ingredients to every widget. That's an asymmetric cost.
The messaging for something like this wants to be "we publicly announced and took credit for this this time", because it's good publicity, and the threat of future, clandestine attacks increases costs across the board. If you can include exactly how you did it, you might even inspire copycats.
Indeed. A single bad review of a product from a user, if justified, can build the impetus to destroy a product. Three bad reviews probably will.
Insurance costs too can be affected.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
Datacenter builders now have to add security so it doesn't happen a second time, perhaps even add it in more places around the world, and the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
The CO2 not emitted by opening a later easily offsets curing by orders of magnitude.
To fully model it you'd have to account for the demand being moved as other centers will pick up the load and try to model either the reduced output and reduced future-demand at the temporarily higher cost.
That's too much effort for me, but "concrete curing causes more CO2" is jumping to a conclusion.
You assume that that cost is going to be borne by the corporation building the facility and not by the general public through lobbying to protect construction sites from mischief (mischief in the legal sense, which in many countries is an indictable offence).
In most democracies, private security generally has to defer to the police for anything that involves actual violence beyond detaining people until the police show up. From that point on, it's up to the police and the courts to deal with the matter.
> the overall attractiveness of building a datacenter in the region go down.
There are two directions this idea can go:
- a reduction in the rule of law by normalizing the idea that it is OK for citizens to damage otherwise legal and permitted construction - insurance costs go up for everyone because the country's government has demonstrated that protection of private property is not one of its priorities.
- an increased police presence / crackdown against protesters. The region remains a competitive venue.
If a country demonstrates the first option, this in turn leaves the corporation with two options:
- move on to a jurisdiction that does respect private property using the police
- move on to a jurisdiction where private security has more latitude to "deal with" protesters
The most likely bottom line impact that this will have, from my perspective: insurance premiums will go up a bit and everything else will stay pretty much the same. Most democratic countries will step in and protect property owners (yay property, sales, and income tax). Governments and courts don't generally look too favourably on protestors who do actual physical damage to people and companies going about their lawful business.
Personally I think data centers should pay a 100% fossil fuel tax. Markets respond to incentives.
It does change people that don't know about your cause against it, quite reliably as long as activism results go.
For climate change, everybody probably heard about it, so yeah.
But I agree that their strategy is lacking. It would probably be easier to get people in general to support it if it didn’t affect them directly, sadly.
Anyone with hard data, step right up...
Yes, by changing the incentives to align with their desires.
I guarantee if a politician had a serious chance of introducing something like this that record breaking amounts of money would be poured into even a primary election these days to stop them.
But they'll just use AI powered flock cameras instead, so never mind.
I wonder if they bothered to get high concentration vinegar.
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
“That achieves nothing” sounds like what a Microsoft PR person would want you to think.
"The real friends are the clicks and attention you receive along the way."
Yes, obviously. Scroll up or down.
This is designed to... affect the corporations. (Swaying public opinion could be seen as a secondary effect.)
I also realize it's not that simple. They probably didn't affect Microsoft here, rather a construction company, who are now calling their insurance company? Or the construction company is eating the cost for the damage, because it's deemed that the site wasn't adequately secured?
You have to be special to think this is comparable to paint throwing on works of art or blocking public roads. Everyone outside tech hates AI.
ask ChatGPT to give you the definition of "echochamber".
No matter how much HN users want to deny it, the cultural zeitgeist is that using AI is immensely uncool. If you only read HN, you'd think that everyone is already on board and the opposition consists of their favorite ivory tower stereotype of the day.
LLMs are still a very convenient shortcut, so most people can and will use them for small things. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating that and concluding that they then must also be OK with consuming AI-generated media, generating correspondence with their friends and family, accepting the new garbage-filled internet or permitting giant AI infrastructure projects. Young people especially don't tolerate it.
So that's pretty much everyone
In the grand scheme of things, the concrete use here is completely unnoticeable. They're not causing extreme ecological damage here. This is a protest that does something about the problem they're complaining about, slows down their enemies and brings a lot of publicity to their act of protest. Without making a value judgement, this is much better than what a lot of other protests achieve in terms of direct effectiveness.
Frankly, the CO2 retort can be reused for almost any protest that destroys or defaces something, because the work to undo or replace that probably creates emissions.
Math is not theirs forte!
It's far grimmer to realise that people know, they just don't think we have an acceptable answer yet.
I'm not willing to accept any climate action, if it means I can't go on holiday abroad or it makes my life meaningfully more expensive etc.
It's selfish, but we need to solve it in a way that makes people globally richer.
(This is one of the great things about renewables coming down in price)
They didn't think through the ecological results of someone scraping off the destroyed concrete and pouring more.
Level of effort is a thing.
EDIT: And Cryo32 said the same thing elsewhere, a few minutes ago!
I hope they look very carefully how this was organized, where the money came from.
Having data centers in your country seems incredibly important, especially to the EU. You'd really hope to see the exact opposite of this behaviour.
Everyone talking about how stupid and ineffective this is. The whole point is to interrupt business as usual to draw attention to the stupidity of our continued head in the sand path. The damage (or lack thereof) is largely irrelevant. The fact a regular person is risking jail to try and stop business as usual is the entire point. It starts with one person.
lol this is not "worker opposition", these are the antics of over educated downwardly mobile elites.
If you want to sabotage their hyperscale data centre construction, you probably should do it from the inside. Get the skills, get a job, get to the top and do a fucking terrible job of it like MSFT's C-suite.
Combine with the fact they have zero clue about what AI is capable of*, they think we are pouring billions into technology to write emails.
(They don't have any idea about current models, let alone an intuition about what future models will be capable of)
You don’t think much or very hard at all, do you?
Sure you can build a data center near me, if your going to fund a new swimming pool and library with the taxes you pay. Also I get reduced local taxes? Even better!
Infrastructure building would be a whole lot easier, if people could directly tie it to tangible benefits.
If the loom smashers had their way, we'd still be dirt farmers living in abject poverty.
1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body
2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations
3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that they could eat and support their families, and incidentally became the top experts on weaving cloth during their lifetimes, which all basically collapsed when looms were automated and mechanized.
It would be very short-sighted to look only at the jobs lost by the few weavers, and not the wealth gained by everyone else.
All of it - the car, the iPhone, the healthcare, the indoor plumbing, the air conditioner, the closet full of clothes - is only possible because of automation.
Once upon a time, everyone was poor. Then, some countries industrialized and others didn't. The ones that didn't are still poor today.
Some countries like China have recently pulled themselves out of poverty through industrialization. Someday Africa will do the same.
I don't think these ideas are as toxic to the current political climate as you think they are. We're probably just a few short years away from the current generation of right-wing populists integrating ideas like "children are useless eaters that are your property to command, make them give back from all that you gave to them" and "work safety and environmental regulations are an emasculating evil, real men want to breathe poison and take risks" right into the core of their platforms.
Right wing populists are nearly as useless as left wing populists now. The people they put into power and now betraying them for monied interests and they’re powerless to stop them. Fools thought they were the harbinger but in reality they were just the vessel.
It’s why major populist characters like MTG and Massie are giving up and getting slaughtered by puppets in a suits in primaries. It’s why Trump has been friendlier to the neocons that spent years insulting him than populists that helped propel him to power.
The real ghouls on the right that need to be stopped are the neo-reactionaries. I knew we were headed for strange times when the Silicon Valley elites simultaneously opened their pockets for the second term. It was purely a power play and it’s seemingly been effective.
I suspect the populists, right and left will care no more for the world they envision than they would for the status-quo even.